THE CHEGOE OR JIGGER. 225 



Whoever has sojourned in a mosquito land knows that there 

 is no radical remedy against them. The Indians who besmear 

 their body with arnatto or turtle fat, slap every moment with 

 their flat hands on their shoulders, back, and legs as often 

 as if they were not painted at all. On the banks of the Amazons 

 the people use cow-dung burnt at their doors, to keep away the 

 praya or plague, as they very justly term the mosquitoes. In 

 the evening every house and cottage has its pan of dung 

 smouldering in the verandah and emitting rather an agreeable 

 odour — but where the insects are very numerous and blood- 

 thirsty this fumigation also is of no avail. 



Not content with a passing attack, a South American gad- 

 fly {CEstrus hominis) deposits its eggs under the human skin, 

 where the larvae continue for six months. If disturbed, they 

 penetrate deeper, and produce troublesome ulcers, which some- 

 times even prove fatal. Thus, in tropical America, we find 

 the same insect tribe which plagues our oxen and horses, and 

 reduces the northern reindeer to desperation, settle on man 

 himself, and render even the lord of creation subject to its 

 power. 



The Chegoe, Pique, or Jigger of the West Indies (Fulex pene- 

 trans) is another great torment of the hot countries of America. 



It looks exactly like a small flea, and a stranger would take 

 it for one. However, in about four and twenty hours he would 

 have several broad hints that he had made a mistake in his 

 ideas of the animal. Without any respect for colour, it attacks 

 different parts of the body, but chiefly the feet, betwixt the 

 toe-nails and the flesh. There it buries itself and causes an 

 itching, which at first is not unpleasant, but after a few days 

 gradually increases to a violent pain. At the same time a 

 small white tumour, about the size of a pea, and with a dark 

 spot in the centre, rises under the skin. The tumour is the 

 rapidly growing nest of the chegoe, the spot the little plague 

 itself. And now it is high time to think of its extirpation, an 

 operation in which the negro women are very expert. Gently 

 removing with a pin the skin from the little round white ball 

 or nest, precisely as we should peel an orange, and pressing the 

 flesh all round, they generally succeed in squeezing it out with- 

 out breaking, and then fill the cavity with snufl" or tobacco, to 

 guard against the possibility of a fresh colony being formed by 



Q 



